


Five Times Leonard McCoy Almost Kills Himself, and One Time He Does

by syredronning



Category: Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-08
Updated: 2010-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-11 14:43:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/113549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syredronning/pseuds/syredronning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between life and death, it's sometimes just a small difference.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Leonard McCoy Almost Kills Himself, and One Time He Does

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: hanky alert  
> Stand-alone, written for no prompt (though I guess, if I searched long enough, I'd find one). Many thanks to Ayalesca for the beta! All remaining errors and weaknesses are mine.

*1*

He sitting in a hospital, and it's almost a normal situation if it weren't for the patient on the bed being his father and his own hands switching off the life-saving medication. It doesn't take long before his old man takes a last, wheezy breath, and then the body slacks. On the monitors, all curves hit bottom as they turn into a straight line, a constant humming noise signaling that the heart has stopped beating.

It's in that moment that the enormity of what he has done, what he has let his father talk him into hits him. He's gone against everything that was holy to him and his vocation in medicine, and he feels his life crumbling.

For a short moment, he feels as if his own heart stops beating; nothing left to him now that he's betrayed every goal he's ever had. For a short moment, he stares at the battery of medicine next to the bed, analyzing which of it would kill him how fast if he swallows it, wondering if it were fast enough before the hospital personnel shows up to check on his dead father.

But then he thinks of his kid and how he can't do that to her; how the murder-suicide would hit the news headlines and destroy her life forever. He straightens and starts shutting off all monitors with shaking hands, until there is only silence left.

*2*

He's sitting cross-legged in the middle of nowhere – well, Iowa, actually, but if there's a nowhere, it's here. Just in front of him, there's a deep, large canyon opening; he vaguely remembers that it's man-made, the disastrous end of one of the early warp drive experiments. The sun is setting, and if he turned his head, he could see the looming shadows of the shipyards all around. But he doesn't.

He's been sitting here for the better part of the day and weighting the pros and cons of just making that one step forward. Now it's windy and chilly and the night falls and he's still undecided. He drinks from the bottle he's bought, and it's the cheapest, sickest stuff he could find, and a part of him wants to find the courage to just make this goddamn step and end his misery.

But when it's finally dark, he realizes the one truth; alcoholics are cowards and he's no exception, and while he's trying his hardest to kill himself slowly, he doesn't have the guts to do it like a man.

He pulls himself together, his legs shaking when he gets up, almost tumbling towards the canyon by sheer lack of balance. The bottle slips out of his hand and he glares after it into the pitch-black hole but he doesn't follow.

A goddamn coward, he thinks, and then starts walking to the shipyards, one step in front of the other.

*3*

His hands are clamped around the steering wheel of the small shuttle so hard that the knuckles shine white. He's sweating, aching all over, his heart beat drumming so loudly in his veins that his brain feels close to exploding. He's one millimeter away from panic and it's only the second day of the two weeks of advanced flight training and it's just killing him.

He's tried his hardest to get a hold on the panic, he's really tried; he's a doctor, for fuck sake, and he's done his psychology 101 and there should be a way to manage it but damn, he's failing again and again. And now they're flying through the valleys of Mars, at a speed that makes him sick just thinking of it, much less flying at. He's already behind, not able to keep the formation.

He's going to fail the advanced flight training, which means he's going to fail a mandatory course and they'll kick him out and he'll go end up in the shit he's tried to leave so hard and the thought is unbearable. His hands are shaking, and the shuttle's showing the first signs of getting out of control. They're flying through the curved valleys and while there're some basic security measures he knows that if he steers into one of the high, bright-red stone walls, he'll end as one mashed-up ball of metal and flesh.

He wouldn't look pretty afterwards but he's really done with this, he just can't do this training, he's just too stupid to get his life under control after all, he's a fucked-up miserable failure and he keeps flying straight towards the next wall, ignoring the warning sounds of the approximation alert.

But then he suddenly thinks of Jim and what the hearing might do to him, one more important person in his life leaving the kid alone in the mess, and he can't do that to his best friend. He starts talking to himself, muttering all the reassurances Jim has said to him before he's been sent on this training, and fuck, he'll make it back alive.

He steers around the edge in the last second, wiping the sweat from his face as he accelerates. He's got to do some catching-up with his formation.

*4*

He's naked in the dark, the metal collar around his neck chained up so high in the wall that he can neither really kneel down nor stand up. His legs are cramping, adding one more layer of pain onto the pile that's been building over the last days. He's a doctor and he's not supposed to end up like this, abducted by some anti-federation splinter group on some backwater planet that wants to use him as a token in negotiations. He hasn't gone through the tough interrogation training of the command track people, and being kicked around hurts like hell and he's not good at dealing with this kind of shit.

And while he's been able to use his anger as a shield during the torture, here in this cell he's all by himself and the anger's quickly substituted by despair. He's not good with being chained up in a hole that's filled up hand-high with muddy water. He's freezing and crawling in his skin from just thinking about all the germs that may float around here. He's not been given water in who-knows-for-how-long but he'd rather die of thirst than to sip from this cesspit, and he's hungry and exhausted and growing more desperate all the time.

He also hates the idea that they could use him for negotiating something from the elected government; he's seen the terrorists' work in the main capital, when he's come in to help with the disaster relief team. That it leads to him being stuck as hostage hasn't been part of the plan. The Enterprise has left a week ago, called to some emergency, and god knows where they are now.

He's trying to find a new position but all are painful and he's close to tears, dammit, he hasn't cried for ages, he won't start now. He bits down the emotions and blindly starts searching the walls of his prison, feeling for anything that would give him something to hold on. The walls are made of masonry, thick bricks layered with mud, and he scratches at the surface and digs into the gaps until his nails are broken. And then suddenly he's got a hold on a broken piece of the filling, and it's so sharp-edged that it cuts his fingers. It's sharp-edged enough to cut his wrists, is the only thing he can think about, and he hangs onto it for hours, maybe days, always talking himself into waiting just a little longer, until finally the door opens and they come and rescue him.

He's still holding onto the piece when he's back in sickbay, Jim tells him later.

*5*

He's in a kind of makeshift-prison, again, but this time it's together with Spock and it might be strangely assuring if not for the fact that they've got thirty minutes to decide which of them is going to be sacrificed in the ongoing festivities for the local deity. It might also be rather amusing to see Spock trying to pull rank with him if it wasn't so serious.

For him, there's no doubt about it who'll step out of this hut and get himself slaughtered, and it's not just because Spock's the best first officer in the fleet and the ship would've been lost a dozen times already but for his brilliancy, and also not because in a strange, unforeseeable way the Vulcan has managed to become someone he thinks of as a friend in a vague, undefined way of meaning.

It's also because of Uhura, who's been talking to him confidentially only two days ago, asking what he'd need from her and Spock to get her pregnant. He's been ready for that question for a while, so he's able to answer most of her questions and to dissolve her fears. They'd do fine, no doubt, and he's looking forward to seeing the two of them as happy parents for the next generation of Vulcans.

Well, even if he wouldn't actually be around for it anymore.

He half-heartedly listens to Spock's arguments on why it's the logical solution when Spock's sacrificing himself, puts in some sharp replies to give the Vulcan an illusion of winning the debate, and then plunges the sedative into Spock's neck. The man's last words are something about "unethical action" but he actually thinks it's a perfectly ethical decision when the chief medical officer saves the life of the first officer; after all, that's what he's out here for.

When they're saved, against all odds, Spock's report spares no words with regard to his insubordination.

**

He's sitting on his balcony, idly staring up into the blue sky over Georgia although the brightness hurts in his eyes. He's been sitting like this for hours, and that means it's actually a good day because the pain has been mild enough not to push him back into the shady room behind him, dozing off on pain killers like on so many other days.

He's been working until three months after the diagnosis of xenopolycythemia, when his hands have started shaking and he's started to forget things, important things. He has resigned, and it's been one of the toughest things for Jim to stomach, but he's unable to change a thing about it. Some colleagues have started research projects on his behalf, but he's put some research of his own into the illness while he still was able to work in the lab, and it's one bastard and no matter what angle he's tried, it's been eating the red blood cells in the Petri dishes, an all-too-real image of what's happening in his body. Maybe the other Spock would've had an answer, but after some of his predictions resulted in a horrible mess when people tried to take counter-measures, the man's all but vanished, together with his dangerous knowledge.

Now it's seven months after the diagnosis, and it's a good day if he can pull himself out onto the balcony without needing anyone to support him, and if he doesn't throw up from the dizziness, and if his vision isn't impaired so much that it's all sprinkled with grey and black, a strange side effect which he's recorded into his medical log. With so little material on xenopolycythemia, it was about time that a doctor was taking a closer look at it, and so he's the galaxy's top expert on it now.

Only, it's still eating him from inside out, and he's just one step away from the state in which he's unable to do anything sensible at all, where it's all just vegetating. And he's sworn to himself the day he's killed his father that if he ever gets to such a point, he wouldn't put his death on anyone else's conscience but his own. With effort, he gets up, fumbling his way into his room and to the small night stand. He heavily sits down on the bed as his legs give in, and his hands shake as he opens the drawer and gets out the hypo. He's filled the load on the day of his diagnosis, and he cradles the instrument that would allow him a last choice in this life.

There's nothing left to be done; he's recorded a message to Joanna, and another message to Jim. Actually, he's tried to write good old-fashioned letters, but his brain and hands have failed, returning only unreadable scribbles on the white paper that's still lying on the table, too much effort to even throw it away.

He's smiling now. It's good to know he's going while still standing, kind of, and looking back his life could've been a lot worse – he's had it all, family and friends and career and adventure, and he's lost many patients who never have had his chances, so he's not complaining. Life has been a bitch at times, but he's been able to make more of it than he's granted himself most of the time, and it's okay to leave now.

He pulls back the sleeve of his shirt, baring his left lower arm. The hypo hisses gently as he presses it against the pale, discolored skin that spans over his bones. Only his bones left – so much truer than on the day he boarded that shuttle.

He's mixed the drugs perfectly; the sedative kicks in first.

"I'm sorry," he whispers as he sinks back. He knows it'll hurt them to get the news, but he also knows from experience it would hurt them a lot more to watch him dying.

Closing his eyes, he gives in to the darkness, finally feeling at peace.

He's sure they'll understand.


End file.
